Drawing upon concepts from service-learning theorists Sarah Ash and Patti Clayton’s DEAL Model for Critical Reflection (2009), this article suggests an innovative approach to critical reflection. Rather than create separate reflection assignments, which can be problematic for a number of reasons described in this article, the author offers composition teachers strategies for embedding critical reflection concepts into composition assignments to create a “reflective course.” The author provides models of types of reflective assignments from a first-year service-learning writing course, including a research paper, a proposal letter to a member of the community, and an oral presentation. These models are adaptable to many levels of rhetoric and composition courses, to many genres, and to students working with a wide range of community partners.

This article nods to a writing project in a Detroit Metro area writing class where students were challenged to take a metaphorical walk inside the walls of inner-city Detroit. Modeling the intersection of theory and practice embedded in this method of seeing the city, it introduces terms from compositionists and other scholars who write about place theory. It suggests that the development of vocabulary for seeing and re-seeing a place can help writers, who are also citizens, interpret the material world around them better and, in the best case, invest or reinvest in their communities. Readers are also asked to consider what Detroit “streetwork” can teach them about consuming and producing text twenty-first century style.

In recent years, numerous scholars have become disillusioned with first-wave critical pedagogy, particularly the idea that transformative intellectuals can emancipate students and advance progressive politics despite working for reactionary educational institutions. Portraying social justice-oriented teachers as dogmatic, naïve, and self-contradictory, these post-first-wave scholars hope instead to cultivate students’ critical literacies within the default and privatized ethos of the American Dream. A handful of other scholars look to literacy education’s progressive extracurriculum for ideological refuge from institutional hegemony. This essay, while agreeing that significant obstacles constrain progressive teaching in ways that first-wave critical pedagogues have not sufficiently acknowledged, nevertheless rejects the idea that progressive teachers are trapped by unavoidable paradox. It argues further that, rather than accentuating a dichotomy between institutional and extracurricular, socially conscientious teachers can more productively negotiate the challenges of progressive education by breaking down walls between these locations.

This article examines Alexander’s experiences teaching literacy and African American Literature to prison inmates at the Orange County Correctional facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For Alexander the conversations and insights provided by these inmates about their experiences and the experiences of the writers they read were indeed emancipatory. As Alexander explains, the process of reading and discussing the works of African American writers can provide a critical lens for understanding one’s own subjugation, and participates in a long tradition of African American community literacy by helping to transform the lives and minds of a population disproportionately comprised of people of color.

This essay argues that African American church founder Richard Allen (1760-1831) developed a rhetorical pedagogy that prefigures the community literacy partnerships of later Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While Allen did not enjoy the material opportunities of institutionalized higher learning, we can interpret passages from his autobiography as a rhetorical pedagogy that affirms the ways of knowing in language of his community, suggests a relationship between language and the truth, and points toward a community pedagogy rooted in language. Allen also figures as a rhetor whose own higher literacy is sponsored by his community, and who returns his rhetorical power to the community for its own betterment. These same dimensions can be witnessed in the pedagogies of later nineteenth-century African American educators, particularly that of Fanny Jackson Coppin of the Institute for Colored Youth, and Daniel A. Payne of Wilberforce University. Moreover, Allen’s very lack of formalized schooling affords us a way of reframing contemporary efforts in university and community partnerships, and offers compelling precedent for Linda Flower’s model of inquiry. For African American higher learning, community literacy partnerships are not merely an additive element of a traditional curriculum; instead, they are the lifeblood of the school itself.

This article investigates service-learning practices and pedagogy at Jackson State University (JSU), a Historically Black University, founded in 1877 to educate underserved and underrepresented African Americans in Mississippi. As a reflection of the university’s motto, “Challenging Minds and Changing Lives,” this research highlights JSU’s concerted efforts to foster students’ participation in school-community literacy partnerships. Since 2009, the university has facilitated academic instruction in first-year English Composition and Literature courses and in second-year Humanities courses. Not only have these efforts enabled JSU students to partner with Elementary schools and African American women’s help initiatives in the Metro-Jackson area, but JSU students have also completed service-learning projects in Limon, Costa Rica. To further illustrate JSU’s commitment to African American literacy partnerships, the authors present a selection of course materials to demonstrate course designs dedicated to service-learning and African American community literacy partnerships.

Review of Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom by Kristie S. Fleckenstein. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

For several decades now, the scholarship of rhetoric and composition studies has shown an increased interest in community literacy and community-based pedagogy. Many point to the emergence of the Ethnography of Literacy (see studies by Heath, Barton, Cushman) and New Literacy Studies (Gee, Street, among others) as an origin for this initial focus on community literacy practices. These areas of scholarship turn our gazes to community literacy practices as rich sites of inquiry that emphasize the social nature of literacy and writing. Linda Flower explains that this turn is, due in part, because “rhetoric and composition studies has long held itself accountable to the public and social significance of writing,” while recognizing its “potentially contradictory goal of developing personally empowered writers” (Community Literacy 76).

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

This article investigates the parameters of civic engagement through digital writing. Specifically, it examines the differences between slacktivism and activism against changing citizenship styles and definitions of civic action. With the goal of rethinking the relationship between civics, digital technology, and slacktivism, it outlines a digital writing project that uses social networking technologies to enact social change by increasing students’ awareness in terms of what counts as civic action in digital spaces. In particular, it draws upon student reflections from a digital writing class to illustrate how engaging Stuart Selber’s three components of computer literacy—the functional, critical, and rhetorical—can afford young citizens an aware and ultimately agentive role in terms of their online civic participation, as well as an opportunity to increase their social capital as digital citizens.

Paula Mathieu is an associate professor of English at Boston College, where she directs the First-Year Writing Program and the Writing Fellows Program. For more than a decade she has also worked with the international movement of street newspapers, local publications that provide income and a public voice for people who are homeless or living in poverty. With David Downing and Claude Mark Hurlbert she co-edited Beyond English Inc: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy (Boynton/Cook, 2001). In 2005, Mathieu published her seminal text (in my humble opinion), Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. In 2007 she received the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award. She has published articles in College Composition and Communication (CCC) and in The Public Work of Rhetoric with Diana George. Mathieu is a CCCCs executive committee member and has been a member of the Reflections Civic Scholarship Outstanding Book Award committee for the past two years; she graciously agreed to conduct this interview at my request.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Her activism and scholarship engages with Feminism, Marxism, and African American studies. Benjamin D. Kuebrich met with Professor Davis at Syracuse University to ask her about issues of pedagogy, rhetoric, and community literacy.

Here are the major writing assignments, sequenced from English 101103, that Jonathan developed for his service-learning course on HIV and AIDS.

This article discusses the practices of sexual literacy by two members of Legato (the collegiate Lesbian and Gay Association) in Istanbul, Turkey, through the perspectives of gateways, sponsors, and the accumulation of literacies. The discussion reveals that sexual literacy is community-based. Therefore, the complex and conflicting notions of community, as inflected by the politics of place and use, are essential for theorizing present and future configurations of sexual literacy in different ways. The conclusion provides suggestions for further research and some thoughts about ways of incorporating pedagogical understandings of how literacies are (self) initiated and acquired, in community-based literacy education.

This essay shares stories and valorizes concepts related to sexualized identities, highlighting details and reflections about exotic dancing, and Bernadette Barton's Stripped. Further, the essay contends that potentially powerful and profound pedagogy exists in exploring these, identities, and that explorations leading to developed awareness of sexually stigmatized individuals and groups may encourage student writers to become more engaged in supporting community engagement.

In Queer Rhetorics, an upper-division service-learning writing course taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, students used queer theory to frame their engagement with local LGBTQ non-profit organizations in Boulder. In their journals, students moved from responding personally to the course material and their volunteer work to generating their own critical inquiries into queer discourse, as well as community-based service projects. This essay argues that self-reflecting on their own sexual citizenship in the context of community engagement fosters students' critical understanding of the public rhetoric of sexuality and gender and the social norms that delimit our sexual worlds.

This paper reports on recent research investigating the effects of service-learning on linguistically and culturally diverse college students enrolled in a first-year composition course. Two separate studies, a pilot and main study involving native (NS) and non-native (NNS) English speaking college students, explore how students from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds respond to and gain from service-learning. The results were mixed, with the initial study indicating NNS students often experience more difficulty finding and successfully completing work in the community while the main study found a similar group of NNS students to expect and gain more from service-learning activities than a comparative group of NS students. Implications for introducing diverse student populations to service-learning activities are discussed in light of these findings.

This essay examines Katrina's impact on service-learning pedagogy, in particular how the instability of the storm's aftermath has generated alternate approaches to service project planning and implementation. Tulane's mandatory service-learning requirement following Katrina led the authors to develop a joint project at New Orleans City Park, which combined five sections of writing students who worked clearing storm debris. The weekly movement from an idealized campus space through devastated areas of the city and park served as the basis for two complementary pedagogical approaches, one treating Katrina's disruption of space; the other treating the storm's disruption of time.

This essay establishes a context for discussing how community literacy pedagogy can benefit from critical engagement with the rhetorical actions of a grassroots social movement. Drawing from ongoing community literacy work in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, I detail the prospects of speaking truth to power in relation to composition studies’ ongoing skepticism of rhetorics of social protest. I end by arguing that there are central aspects associated with oppositional rhetorics that can be encountered in community literacy initiatives and used to support forms of social change often excluded from conciliatory rhetorics.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a preliminary step in describing and understanding this transformative experience. The differences between the prison writing teachers and the teachers Shaughnessy describes illuminates how much the field of composition has grown in the last forty years. The interviews with these six teachers speak to the experiences of teachers in community outreach teaching situations and may be a step in understanding and articulating these experiences.

Most discussions of service-learning focus on the potential pitfalls of working with students who inhabit relatively privileged positions. While this crucial concern deserves attention, it has limited our focus by encouraging students to cross borders, to encounter people different from themselves rather than to encounter something different within themselves or within their own communities. This approach may be particularly problematic for students of color whose education for social justice, citizenship, and historical consciousness might best be furthered by a writing, or might I say a “re-writing,” pedagogy that emphasizes recursive spatial movement through place over time—a “writing as the community” service-learning paradigm.

This essay explores student-authored ethnographies written by undergraduates in four sections of a service-learning course taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. I argue that the introductory sections of students’ ethnographic narratives provide particular insights into the relationship between the service experience, ethnographic inscription, and student subjectivities. Following a discourse analysis of student writing, I offer some thoughts about how instructors might improve the pedagogical pairing of ethnographic writing with service-learning experiences.

I argue that literacy studies needs to define the role of peace in our efforts to pursue social justice. Drawing on the work of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I show that promoting peace is the means, as well as the end, of working toward social justice. Further, I demonstrate that the process of transforming alienation into connection is a crucial step in fostering peace. Using this framework, I analyze ethnographic data on one highly successful writing instructor's classroom literate practices to illustrate a pedagogical approach that helped shift both students and teacher from alienation to connection.

Writing assignments carry political ramifications even when they attempt neutrality; students should learn that all writing occurs within larger contexts of power. To accomplish this goal, I advocate instruction derived from practices of critical rhetoric, critical revision, and critical discourse analysis. Rhetoric education, based on Donald Lazere's Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy, trains students not only for academic writing, but for citizenry. Students write what David Bartholomae calls "practical criticism," critically revising their own texts. Also, students may practice the methodology of critical discourse analysis, as prescribed by Thomas Huckin, in a course that integrates civic literacy with introductory CDA assignments.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

This article focuses on America's Army Game, the first-person-shooter video game now being peddled by the U.S. Army for classroom use. In my community-based literacy class, where students partner with children and teens at a local youth center, this "game" helps us to grasp and problematize literacy sponsorship and recruitment-the idea that literacy education involves not just learning a new set of practices but also trying out a social identity. Through this class, I argue for a pedagogy of multiliteracies that's committed to counter-recruitment: to enlarging ideological space so that critical questions can be formed and alternatives entertained.

My experiences teaching a service-learning composition class entitled Writing Women Safe that dealt with sexual violence against women point to a missing link between course content and community-based activism. Students in my all-female class wrote about and discussed the reality of rape, sometimes in the context of their own lives. However, for all the real talk about a real crime, our well-intentioned service component, the design of informational pamphlets for a rape crisis center, did not draw on students' personal resources, nor evoke a believable sense of "change agency." Greater engagement with avenues for action through writing, perhaps via the community partner's work in the local justice system, as well as deeper reflection on students' strengths and positioning, are central concerns as I revise my approach to the course. Faced with the prospect of one day implementing Writing Women Safe at my new institution, I argue that, as educators and scholars committed to community-based learning, we must develop partnerships that push all involved more deeply into honest assessment of needs, resources, and perspective.

We discuss how studying and creating zines in our composition classes allows our students to negotiate and explore the complexities of writing without the compulsions of many of the politically problematic commonplaces of composition pedagogy. We use zines to examine the unique ways in which their rhetorical devices address conflicts around questions of audience and diversity, as well as the particular questions that the zines raise about the politics of persuasion, our own writing practices, writing strategies that the zines suggest to us, and the construction of alternative communities.

The writing I received in my first-semester composition class at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, the semester immediately following Hurricane Katrina was stunning with respect to both student commitment and narrative sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative example of this writing entitled "life During Katrina" by a student I have called "K." The student's essay developed a thesis, documented a chronology, increasingly included detail, naturally included dialogue, and reached a sensitive and sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative sincerely reflective conclusion. Moreover, the student (like my other students in that class) was extraordinarily committed to revision, working diligently on issues of both grammar and clarity. My own conclusion to the remarkable post-Katrina student writing I experienced is that our teaching of Freshman Composition can be much more artificial than we really desire it to be. How to make first-year writing courses more meaningful to students is an imperative that I believe we must continue to explore.

Mercy College professors in Toledo, Ohio responded to Hurricane Katrina through a disaster pedagogy. Students in composition classes created research wikis and participated in email dialogues and exchanges with University of New Orleans students. A new course, Service in Action: The Sociological Impact of Hurricane Katrina, was also created involving an alternative, volunteer-based spring break trip. This reflection explores how communal engagement is shaped, augmented, and challenged by the use of emergent technologies, and how, through the lens of service-learning, students may find their own voices, coming to recognize that they have the power and where-with-all to effect change.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, writing instructors at the University of New Orleans felt compelled to incorporate personal, social, and political aspects of the storm into their classrooms. In this article, individual instructors discuss a particular pedagogical approach assignment, class theme, or teaching strategy that we adopted, exploring its rationale and reflecting on our students' reactions and responses to place-based and civic-minded pedagogies during a time of crisis.

In recent decades, higher education has increasingly relied on contingent faculty to teach multiple sections of composition courses with low pay and few benefits. Administrators have argued that institutions need these faculty to protect tenure-track faculty in times of financial difficulty and to manage fluctuating enrollments. When Hurricane Katrina forced universities and community colleges to declare financial exigency or force majeur, contingent faculty were the first to be terminated. However, their dismissal did not protect tenured and tenure-track faculty. Moreover, without contingent faculty, the Xavier University English Department successfully managed to staff composition classes in the first semesters following Katrina, a period of uncertainty and fluctuating enrollments. This success shows that the employment of large numbers of part-time faculty cannot be rationalized. Furthermore, faculty should strive to integrate part-time colleagues into the academy, and administrators should follow the example of departments which have successfully converted part time positions into tenure-track appointments.

Two problems catapulted Wendy Rihner into service learning: Hurricane Katrina's destruction of Louisiana's coast and the lack of context plaguing so many college composition courses. Rihner undertook a service-learning project with an English  Composition II course in the spring of 2007 that radically changed her pedagogical philosophy. "Providing Context" discusses Rihner's desire to provide her students with a context for writing argumentative essays while raising awareness of the ecological disaster that is unique to Louisiana.

Being situated on an international bordar allows higher-education institution to explore diverse cultural and linguistic venues for teaching and learning. Such is the case for workplace writing courses at the University of Texas at El Paso. Workplace writing, intercultural communication, service-learning, and bilingualism became the tools for exploring diversity, strengthening student identities, and bridging disciplinary, geographical. cultural, and linguistic borders. This article includes the voices of service-learning students, agency mentors, and faculty involved in an English-Spanish workplace writing course and shows how service-learning empowers students to explore and strengthen their diverse identities.

This article explains the procedure, content, and impact of a unique intergenerational exchange: the service-learning component of a capstone writing course focused on the complex genre of memoir. The investigation of memoir writing was conducted both theoretically and experientially as undergraduate writers worked in pairs to "ghost write" the memoirs of a fascinating group of senior citizens. This exploration of memoir—and of age as a frequently overlooked dimension of diversity—proved a powerful nexus for demonstrating the long-held belief that carefully-structured, community-based pedagogy significantly benefits its participants both affectively and academically.

This article examines a community-based writing assignment that invited first-year students to Intervene in controversies surrounding Chicago's Millennium Park. Despite the apparent diversity of student arguments, a single ideology permeated all student texts. Whether self identifying as liberal or conservative, students deployed almost identical rhetoric to assert that the park either embodied or failed to embody "democratic values." We learned that, however threatening it may be to our own Ideological Investments, we must push students to interrogate their foundational assumptions. Given currant orthodoxy about the morality of any action or idea labeled "democratic," it is important that teachers work to stimulate true diversity of opinion by challenging democracy" as a trump argument.

In the five years of a newspaper project involving high school and university students that publishes an annual special edition exploring a diversity issue within the local community, several key pedagogical, political, and economic revisions have been made. Nevertheless, the bedrock principles of service-learning and civic journalism have remained constant. The project history shows that a sound theoretical foundation rooted in student and community education and awareness can withstand pressures of censorship by school administrators, ethical and pedagogical concerns that balance student safety with product integrity, and the economic need to become self-sufficient.

Review of Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition by Paula Mathieu. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Heinemann, 2005.

Our goal for this special issue was to gathersome of the most experienced teacher-scholars of community-engaged writing and rhetoric and ask them how they tend and refine their courses in order to keep them meaningful, relevant, and sustainable. In a sense we view this volume as a way to maintain the momentum created by such collections as the 1997 Writing the Community edited by Linda Adler-Kassner, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters, which helped launch the American Association for Higher Education's effort to increase institutional awareness of service-learning through intra- and interdisciplinary scholarship, and the 2000 special issue of Language and Learning Across the Disciplines edited by Ellen Cushman, which emphasizes matters of institutionalization. Both publications pay special attention to the situated practices of educators in long-term programs and partnerships. We extend that discussion with a collection that foregrounds pivotal pedagogical decisions and generative questions.

This article connects the author’s practice, Fulkerson’s “map” of composition studies, and insights from critical race studies, specifically whiteness studies, to argue that even though many or even most community-based writing courses fit into a critical/cultural studies-type philosophy, such an orientation is limited. The article argues for “community-engaged procedural rhetorical,” in which students would learn in community-engaged writing courses the meta-skills to analyze what strategies and tactics worked rhetorically and materially to make change in a given situation, and to extrapolate this learning toward the future.

From its beginnings in 1992, the Service-Learning Writing Project at Michigan State University has viewed the composition classroom as a place where rhetorical processes and democratic practices naturally converge. A number of core democratic principles, pedagogical challenges, ongoing conversations, and shared convictions about education for democracy continue to animate and energize the Project’s faculty—including a consistent emphasis on encouraging democratic discourses and learning practices in the writing classroom, a search for pedagogical techniques that connect theory and practice, and efforts to reinvigorate the teaching of the Humanities as important and necessary cultural work in the public interest.

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action. Included are descriptions of assignments for first-year and advanced courses, plus student samples of genre analysis memos.

Over the last several years, service-learning has become a burgeoning area in technical and professional communication studies. In addition to offering pedagogical strategies and theoretical approaches, the scholarship in this area to date points to several concerns for the continuing growth of high-quality service-learning in our field: 1) building reciprocal, sustained community partnerships, 2) developing robust approaches to reflection, and 3) assessing how well models of service-learning achieve their objectives.

Reflecting upon current research and my own pedagogical practices when teaching and administering client-consultant projects in business and technical writing courses, I outline how critical stakeholder theory can help to establish an ethic of care among the participants in client-consultant projects and connect students’ professional and civic lives.

In response to recent calls for internationalization and greater social relevance in professional communication teaching and research, this article links service-learning pedagogy with participatory action research (PAR) methods. A multi-year collaborative project in Kenya illustrates both the challenges and the positive outcomes of international partnerships, which include increased intercultural communication skills, significant contributions to the literature, invigoration of teaching and curriculum, and the development of global civic awareness among all participants. In their recommendations for faculty interested in developing similar partnerships, the authors highlight the importance of understanding the theoretical foundations of service-learning pedagogy and PAR methods, and advocate for the incorporation of exploratory site visits, pre-departure preparation for both students and faculty, critical reflection, efforts to ensure reciprocal benefits, and ongoing outcomes assessment.

Insights from activity theory—specifically, David Russell’s synthesis of activity theory with genre theory—suggest ways to understand and ease problems of clashing expectations encountered in professional writing classes that use a client-based assignment model for service-learning.

Service learning as a pedagogy and its partner, community based research, have both made productive interventions into prison and jail life, greeted many times with relief by administrative staffs no longer funded for what some politicians call the “extras” of education. From the inside, administrators and inmates join those on the outside—ex-inmates, educators, concerned family members, students and other citizens—to stimulate intellectual and practical engagements between the separated communities that prison engenders. Many of the activities and programs discussed in these pages have started new conversations that reach beyond the walled and barred “homes” of the incarcerated.

The article describes the dynamics of freshman composition classes for medium-security inmates at the Saginaw Correctional Facility which were linked to parallel classes at Saginaw Valley State University, supported by SVSU student-tutors, and enhanced by collaboratively produced publications of student writing. It presents excerpts from inmates’ essays that tell their stories, explore their relationships, and portray their prison world and discusses the impact of writing on inmates enrolled in the linked composition classes.

This article discusses a service-learning project for an English Composition class, focusing on the theme of incarcerated women. Through class projects, which included a book drive and research for the group Prison Watch, the students and teacher learned to negotiate the tricky demands of audience and worked to develop a new model of successful service learning.

This article explores a unique approach to becoming literate about prisons ––through a dialogical exchange between individuals on both sides of the wall. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program offers a semester-long course through which college students and incarcerated men or women attend class together weekly inside a local correctional facility. Pivotal to this pedagogy is the power and reciprocity of the exchange between the “inside” and “outside” students. The depth of discussion involved, the collaborative nature of the engagement, and the consideration of the issues (literally from the inside, out)––together encompass an approach to learning that changes lives.